Google confirmed it is experimenting with human-curated content with Editors Picks, a new section on Google News that features favorite stories culled from editors at Reuters, The Washington Post, Newsday, and several other publications.

A new experiment Google is conducting on Google News includes a special section that features favorite stories culled from editors at Reuters, The Washington Post, Newsday, and several other publications. That approach is a critical departure from Google's usual math-based methodology. This sort of human-crafted curation is proving increasingly popular in this age where user-generated content has become the rule instead of the exception.

That approach is a critical departure from Google's usual math-based methodology. The Editors Picks section lets professional journalists - not the usual search algorithms - pick the stories that appear there, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab, which discovered the experiment June 10.